Inria Chile continues its development in South America. In recent years, with Claude Puech at the helm, she has strengthened her network of contacts and has set up partnerships with investment structures to accelerate the creation of strategies in Chile. Appointed on September 1st as Director, Nayat Sanchez Pi intends to pursue this strategy and implement an ambitious settlement project that includes opening to French partners, the revitalization of the transfer policy and the establishment of a sustainable economic model.

Thirty years ago, the Web was set up to meet an ever-growing need to organise and access information. As a founding member for Europe of the W3C, Inria take a look back at the birth of the Web as both a research subject and a tool, assessing the problems that continue to be raised.

Capitalizing on five years of research-collaboration success, Mitacs and Inria renewed their partnership originally signed in 2014. The memorandum of understanding (MOU) supports two-way international research opportunities for graduate researchers at Canadian universities and at eight Inria Research Centres in France.

The CNIL (French Data Protection Authority) and Inria have awarded the 2017 "privacy protection" Prize to a European research team. During the 11th international conference Computers Privacy and Data Protection
(CPDP) to Seda GÜRSES, Carmela TRONCOSO and Claudia DIAZ for their article « Engineering privacy by design reloaded
».

The CCSD (Centre for Direct Scientific Communication) and Software Heritage have announced their collaboration beginning early 2018: it will enable the data repository in HAL to be extended to software and, as a result, contribute to the recognition of the work of research software developers.

Facebook is investing an additional 10 million Euros and doubling the Facebook AI Research (FAIR) team in order to accelerate research on artificial intelligence in France. As a result, Facebook's European hub is strengthening its partnership with Inria.

Facebook is investing an additional 10 million Euros and doubling the Facebook AI Research (FAIR) team in order to accelerate research on artificial intelligence in France. As a result, Facebook's European hub is strengthening its partnership with Inria.

InriaSoft aims for the durable development of large-scale software programs by bringing together their user communities within consortia that will finance a team of engineers tasked with their maintenance and evolution. The InriaSoft headquarters are based in Rennes, as Claude Labit, director, and David Margery, technical director of this national action backed by the Fondation Inria, explain.

MoGo on top of its game!

The game of Go, a breeding ground for technologies for a number of fields. MoGo, a project coordinated by Olivier Teytaud from the Tao project-team, was invited to attend the 2009 Taiwan Open. It beat the world record for the best performance in 19x19 Go.Combining innovative Artificial Intelligence and multi-core, message-passing parallelisation, it has been notching up victories against professional players. In addition to its application in the game of Go, this parallel algorithm can also be used to address a vast range of problems.

In 1997, a computer beat world chess champion Garry Kasparov for the first time. Until recently, however, the game of Go was the exclusive preserve of human beings. More complex than chess, with more than 10 to the power 600 possible games, which is more than the number of particles in the Universe, the game of Go represents a remarkable education in strategy. In a game where human beings had shown themselves to be far superior to machines, computers have now managed to reach the level of a professional Go player.
However, as the current programs are still not strong enough to beat high-level players, they are given an advantage: they are given a number of successive moves at the start of the game, which constitutes a handicap for the professional player. The progression of MoGo through its series of victories is therefore principally measured in terms of the reduction in the size of the handicap imposed on the professional players. At the 2009 Taiwan Open (10-13 February 2009), MoGo won a match for the first timewith a handicap of only 7 stones against an elite player, Zhou Junxun, a highly respected 9th Dan Pro who won the 2007 LG Cup, as well as a match with a 6-stone handicap against a professional player, Li-Chen Chien.

At this international competition, MoGo, a product of French computer science research, demonstrated the results of three scientific or technological advances:

Firstly, the "One-Armed Bandit" algorithms have made it possible to (partially) explore the space of possible matches. In so doing they have revolutionised the notion of planning in an uncertain world.

Furthermore, the assessment of positions is founded on Monte-Carlo algorithms, simulating the behaviour of a low-level stochastic player, but without any bias.

Finally, large-scale parallelism (notably with GRID’5000) has made it possible to have the necessary computing power for a Monte-Carlo evaluation to provide sufficiently precise results.

These developments have thus made it possible to find new applications for this algorithm. Beyond the game of Go, the software used is based on innovative technologies that can be used in numerous fields, particularly resource saving, which is crucial to environmental issues.Indeed, the game of Go poses scientific problems that are very difficult to solve. Even if, in theory, the game is deterministic - i.e. it can be programmed without any particular difficulties - astronomical computing times would be required to find the solution. Yet here the parallel algorithms make it possible to use computer grids and to solve problems of planning and possibility ordering. Ordering possibilities, for example, may be counted in billions of billions, and the aim is to find the most efficient order among this host of possibilities. The game of Go is therefore a good model for developing and testing new techniques to resolve this kind of scheduling problem.